Colloquium

Junior and senior physics majors attend our biweekly colloquium series,
held on Tuesday afternoons at 4:30 pm in Shanahan B460. The talks are
open to all students and to the public, and are frequently attended by
scientists from the other Claremont Colleges, Cal Poly Pomona, and others. The series
features speakers from a broad range of institutions and fields of physics.

The physicists on the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Clinic team (Emily Lane and Arch Robison) will describe their project, and the physicists on the Sandia National Laboratory Clinic team (Ále Baptista, Andrew Bishop, and Lupe MacIntosh) will describe theirs.

We are excited to welcome back to campus three recent HMC physics graduates to provide their insights into the job market for physics graduates and tips on landing your first job. Wylie Rosenthal (’12) took an optical engineering job with Zygo after graduating and worked there for three years before moving in 2015 to the Giant Magellan Telescope Organization. Chris ...

Like a well-written paper, an effective talk should begin with a shared context, state the problem to be addressed and the main points to be made, and use visuals for clarity and redundancy. Unlike a paper a talk proceeds synchronously and demands that the speaker provide more explicit reminders of the underlying structure of the presentation to keep the audience ...

Space radiation from high-energy particles is a field that is of increasing importance in this dawning space age. Extreme space weather events are responsible for a variety of problems including satellite failures and radio blackouts, and also have the potential for catastrophic impacts on Earth such as a near-global loss of the power grid. Additionally, radiation protection for astronauts is ...

Hendrik Oldag, SLAC Ultrafast and Very Small: Discover Nanoscale Magnetism With Picosecond Time Resolution Using X-Rays

Today’s magnetic device technology is based on complex magnetic alloys or multilayers that are patterned at the nanoscale and operate at gigahertz frequencies. To better understand the behavior of such devices one needs an experimental approach that is capable of detecting magnetization with nanometer and picosecond sensitivity. In addition, since devices contain different magnetic elements, a technique is needed that ...

Ivan Deutsch, University of New Mexico Breaking Heisenberg: Controlling the Quantum World

The quantum information revolution has taught us that quantum mechanics is not a paler version of its classical counterpart, hindered by intrinsic uncertainty and random measurement outcomes. Au contraire! A machine whose operation takes full advantage of the laws of quantum mechanics has information processing capabilities well beyond those that are restricted to essentially classical laws. To harness this power ...